Overview

The ZED is a 2K stereo camera with dual 4MP RGB sensors, a 110° field of view and ƒ/2.0 aperture.
The ZED streams uncompressed video at up to 100 FPS in WVGA format. It is an UVC-compliant USB 3.0 camera backwards compatible with USB 2.0.

Selecting a Video Mode

The left and right video frames are synchronized and streamed as a single uncompressed video frame in side-by-side format. You can change video resolution and framerate in the ZED Explorer or using the API.

There are several video modes available:

Video Mode

Output Resolution (side by side)

Frame Rate (fps)

Field of View

2.2K

4416x1242

15

Wide

1080p

3840x1080

30, 15

Wide

720p

2560x720

60, 30, 15

Extra Wide

WVGA

1344x376

100, 60, 30, 15

Extra Wide

Selecting a View

The ZED outputs images in different formats. You can select between rectified, unrectified and grayscale images:

Adjusting Camera Settings

The ZED camera features an onboard ISP (Image Signal Processor) that performs various image processing algorithms on the raw image captured by the dual image sensors. Several parameters of the ISP can be adjusted directly from the ZED Explorer app or through the ZED SDK:

Resolution

FPS

Brightness – Controls image brightness.

Contrast – Controls image contrast.

Hue – Controls image color.

Saturation – Controls image color intensity.

Gamma – Controls gamma correction.

White Balance – Controls camera white balance.

Exposure – Controls shutter speed. Setting a long exposure time lead to an increase in blur.

Gain – Controls digital amplification of the signal from the camera sensor.

When the camera is in ‘Auto’ mode, parameters such as exposure, gain and white balance are automatically adjusted depending on the scene.

Video Recording

The ZED is a UVC camera so you can capture stereo video in MP4 or AVI format using any third-party software.

However to use the ZED SDK, you will need to record your videos in Stereolabs SVO format. SVO files contains additional metadata such as timestamp and sensor data. When loading SVO files, the ZED API will behave as if a ZED was connected and live feed was available. Every module of the ZED API will be available: depth, tracking, spatial mapping and more. To record SVO videos, you can use the ZED Explorer application in GUI or command-line mode or build your own recording app using the ZED API.

Compression modes

SVO videos can be recorded using various compression modes. We provide both lossless and compressed modes to preserve image quality or reduce file size.

Compression Mode

Compression Ratio

Quality (SSIM)

CPU Load (%)

GPU Load (%)

Platform

LOSSLESS (PNG)

2:1

100

32.0

0.0

Any

LOSSY (JPG)

4:1

95.5

29.5

0.0

Any

AVCHD (H.264)

100:1

96.9

3.1

5.0

Requires NVIDIA GPU for hardware encoding

HEVC (H.265)

100:1

97.3

2.9

5.0

Requires NVIDIA GPU (Pascal or above) for hardware encoding

Best Practice for Recording

For optimal performance, we recommend using the H.264 and H.265 recording modes. They benefit from the hardware-based encoder (referred to as NVENC) built into NVIDIA graphics cards. With encoding offloaded to NVENC, the GPU and the CPU are free for other operations. For example, in a compute-heavy scenario, it is now possible to record video at full frame rate with minimal impact on the main application.

For more information on capturing, playing and converting AVI and SVO video files, see the Recording samples on GitHub.